REE NANCARROW: Quilts as Witness
After decades of caregiving near Alaska's Denali National Park, 84-year-old Ree Nancarrow now stitches ecological change into deeply layered quilts.
REE NANCARROW’s quilts stitch what most of us overlook: melting lakes, vanishing birds, and methane bubbles under Arctic ice. After five decades living near Alaska’s Denali National Park, Ree turns ecological change into layered visual stories, using dyed fabric and a lifetime of close observation. At 84, her deep understanding of climate change and vegetation proves that quilts are not simply cosy blankets — they serve as vessels of scientific insight and personal memory.
In 1964, Ree started a summer job at Camp Denali, a tourist accommodation on the west side of Denali National Park, home to the largest mountain of the United States. She spent that following winter in Alaska and married the next summer. Ree taught undergraduate botany classes at a university and continued to teach community art classes during her first two decades in Alaska. Her late husband, Bill, had arrived at Denali National Park in 1948 and became Denali’s first naturalist in 1952. Passionate about the environment, they chose to live close to nature for a large chapter of their life together.
I meet Ree at Fairbank’s Well Street Art Gallery, where she’s exhibiting her quilts alongside her multi-media artist friend Margo Klass. “I am so glad we get to meet at a time when I am exhibiting in town,” she smiles warmly. When I ask her to give me a tour, Ree begins with her most personal piece: Change at Deneki Lakes (2021). “We lived on a tundra pond in Denali Park for 50 years. Right outside our picture window, we’d see all kinds of wildlife passing by, with the Carlo Mountain in the background.”
What was it like to watch the landscape change so slowly and completely?
“When we first moved to Deneki Lakes, the water was deep, and there was only a thin layer of sediment. Over the decades, we watched it fill in. Now it’s much shallower. Arctic terns don’t come any more; they need deep water. I placed ghost images of them in the quilt because we haven’t seen them in years. The equisetum started to close in the lake from the edges. This quilt shows what we saw from our window over fifty years: from left to right, through the seasons and through the changes.
It’s what I’ve lived. I like to hide animals and vegetation in my quilts. If you search around, you’ll find them, but they’re not immediately in your face. It’s kind of like Alaska itself — it reveals itself if you look long enough.”
Ree’s scientific collaborations started with the University of Alaska’s In Time of Change (ITOC) programme, a long-term art and ecology initiative she has worked on for over 17 years. “I used to bring in my own fabrics and images of vegetation and mountains. But ITOC asked me to actually tell a story. That’s when I started making specific fabrics based on the elements I wanted to show.”
One of those ideas involved microbial life in melting tundra lakes. A world we would rarely see, let alone sew. “Microbes don’t need oxygen,” Ree explains. “They just keep eating all winter, releasing methane bubbles that get trapped under the ice. They rise in different sizes and layers. Scientists stick an awl into the bubbles and light them on fire, bursting into flames.”
Polychrome Slide (2021), addresses a more visible but equally devastating impact: the collapse of Denali’s park road due to melting permafrost. This quilt demonstrates the layers of sloughed-off earth cascading down a mountainside. The quiet, soft material captures a violent geological shift. In the stitched terrain, Ree hides year-long inhabitants — a golden eagle, grizzly bear, and a pika — who continue to witness these changes alongside her.
Did quilts always play such a central role in your life, or did it grow over time?
"Our first son had many health issues, so I focused on being a caregiver for many years. My mom came to live with me, and my husband was legally blind the last 20 years we were married. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. Now, Bill has been gone for 13 years, and for the first time in my life, I am a full-time artist. I wouldn’t have chosen the solitude, but since it’s here, I am claiming it fully. I can get up in the morning, walk into my studio, and spend the whole day creating without interruption. It’s pretty cool.
I didn’t always quilt, but I honestly think that it was bound to happen. I’ve spun, dyed, painted – always worked with fabric and my hands. I relate to quilting because it feels like a collage. It gives me the opportunity to use the designs and ideas I’ve created over the years. For example, I’m working on some drawings from 1964-65. I’ve also dyed such a wide variety of fabrics that I can look in my stash and think, ‘I wonder what that looks like.’ Like a collage, I keep moving, changing, and replacing elements until it finally expresses what I feel.”
Watching Ree talk about her current life felt like sitting in front of a woman who had quietly taken the reins — not to prove anything, but simply because she could. In her studio, surrounded by decades of fabric and memory, Ree does not work for legacy or ambition, but for the mere pleasure of creating. It’s kind of a second coming; a creative life lived on her own clock.
Ree and I drive to her home. In contrast to her colourful quilts, Ree’s condo has earthy tones and light, wooden interior. It feels more like a representation of her welcoming character — warm, cosy, but organised. The living room is filled with earlier items Ree made before she became a full-time artist, including spun works with diverse hairs and fibres that were crafted together with her husband. There are also early quilts that portray the female body, something that differs from Ree’s contemporary works depicting nature and the effects of climate change.
A large table dominates Ree’s studio space. She has a large closet stashed with fabrics that are sorted by colour and patterns, many of which she has dyed herself over time. There are many fabrics pinned against the wall, where Ree is still in the middle of figuring out what element will be pieced next to the other. Once she has pinned everything together, she pieces them, adds batting and backing, and quilts it using matching or contrasting lines that sometimes portray additional figures. “I know that there are artists that can see it all from the start, but I can’t relate to that at all. I discover happy accidents – or something dreadful. The happy accident can give you a spark that you could never think of in a million years.”
At 84, Ree has entered what some might call her prime – not in defiance of age, but in full partnership with it. In a time when climate discourse is often driven by the young, her quiet authority feels all the more profound. Ree has lived the shifts she stitches. There is no rhetoric in her quilts; just memory, witness, and the rare kind of knowledge that only comes when staying close to a place for a very long time.